that it is a mere abusing of our understandings to give credit to
the words of those who say that there is any such thing as a natural
language. All speeches have had their primary origin from the
arbitrary institutions, accords, and agreements of nations in their
respective condescendments to what should be noted and betokened
by them. An articulate voice, according to the dialecticians, hath
naturally no signification at all; for that the sense and meaning
thereof did totally depend upon the good will and pleasure of the
first deviser and imposer of it."

Max Müller, following Professor Heyse, of Berlin, published an
ingenious theory of primitive speech, to the effect that man had a
creative faculty giving to each conception, as it thrilled through his
brain for the first time, a special phonetic expression, which faculty
became extinct when its necessity ceased. This theory, which makes
each radical of language to be a phonetic type rung out from the
organism of the first man or men when struck by an idea, has been
happily named the "ding-dong" theory. It has been abandoned mainly
through the destructive criticisms of Prof. W.D. WHITNEY, of Yale
College. One lucid explanation by the latter should be specially
noted: "A word is a combination of sounds which by a series of
historical reasons has come to be accepted and understood in a certain
community as the sign of a certain idea. As long as they so accept
and understand it, it has existence; when everyone ceases to use and
understand it, it ceases to exist."

Several authors, among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was
but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that
is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the
"bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the